1. Field of the Invention
The disclosures herein generally relate to information processing technologies for assisting collaborative activity, and particularly relate to a collaborative-activity assisting apparatus, a collaborative-activity assisting system, a collaborative-activity assisting method, and a recording medium having a collaborative-activity assisting program embodied therein for providing an environment in which a plurality of users can share activity contexts indicative of shared information and activity statuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
In corporations as well as in government and national agencies, most work is performed by the people engaged in the work (who will hereinafter be referred to as “persons involved”) such that they share various types of information to collaborate in the work. Especially in a project aimed toward attaining a particular objective, persons involved typically communicate with each other, and share documents, schedule information, task lists, calendar, etc. to perform collaborative work. As means to assist the progress of a project, various management tools are available, which include contents management systems, project management systems, workflow management systems, schedule management systems, and bulletin board systems (or mail systems).
Various types of information that are shared are separately managed by individual management tools, which is not satisfactory from the viewpoint of user friendliness. It is thus desired to develop a management tool that is more user-friendly. When a meeting regarding a given project is to be held, for example, various management tools need to be utilized to achieve the following tasks: (1) identifying the schedule of each person involved by use of a schedule management system; (2) registering documents needed in the meeting by use of a contents management system; (3) requesting a meeting by sending a mail indicative of the date and time of the meeting together with a link to the documents; (4) generating a document containing the minutes of the meeting after the meeting; (5) sending a mail providing a link to the minute document, and (6) entering the notice indicative of the completion of the meeting into a project management system. In this procedure, a person in charge needs to select a proper management tool by taking into account the procedure to switch applications. This requires cumbersome decision making processes and machine operations.
From the viewpoint of sharing of information in collaborative activity, appropriate information needs to be selectively shown depending on activity statuses as well as on the role and authority of persons involved. For a person involved who can access shared information, viewing all the shared information relating to the project at once is not convenient because it will then be necessary to search for information relevant to his/her own activities. For example, when a document is to be reviewed, a reviewer needs to access the document and review comments in order to add or modify the review comments. A manager who manages the entire project, however, may not need to access all the review comments, and may only need to check whether a review result is correctly reflected. By the same token, for a person who has got involved in a project halfway through, viewing all the information regarding project at once may not be convenient. It would be difficult to correctly grasp the progress status of the project unless all the updates are checked in a temporal sequence.
It is often the case that an individual belonging to an organization such as a corporation is engaged in plural projects or in plural activities of a single project. Such a person performs his/her work by switching the projects or the activities. In this case, there is a need to locate necessary information, which of course differs from project to project or from activity to activity. In a current situation, a person involved typically devises a mechanism by himself/herself, by which necessary information can be easily located.
Against this background, there have been attempts to develop a collaborative activity assisting system for which user-friendliness is improved. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2000-181956 (Patent Document 1) discloses an information management sharing system that uses only a typical Internet environment and browser to provide basic functions to various combinations of users and groups such that these basic functions are used in group activities to make announcements, to manage schedules, to use bulletin boards, and to manage tasks, addresses, links, and bookings. This information management sharing system stores information regarding individuals and information regarding organizations separately from each other for management purposes. When there are two or more organizations to which a given individual belongs, information is stored and managed separately for each organization. A user specifies access authorization for each organization, so that another user can access the information only if he/she belongs to an authorized organization. The information management sharing system is also provided with the function to request a task to be performed in a collaborative work and schedule.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-18791 (Patent Document 2) discloses a method for managing and allowing collaborative activity data to be viewed from within the contexts of a shared electronic document. This method displays a document edit pane for editing a shared document, and also displays a collaborative activity pane for displaying collaborative activity data alongside the document edit pane. Collaborative activity data such as one or more participant identifiers, tasks, documents, links, and other relevant information are displayed in the collaborative activity pane. Through the collaborative activity pane, an action on any selected item of the collaborative activity data is performed.
Japanese Patent No. 3547159 (Patent Document 3) discloses a collaborative activity assisting system that provides a framework by which a partition configuration matching the characteristics of work is generated by providing, in a collaborative activity area on display screen, a work area that displays contents that do not necessarily match contents viewed by others. This collaborative activity assisting system provides, as collaborative activity areas, a content-based collaborative activity area for displaying the same contents, a format-based collaborative activity area having the same format, a theme-based collaborative activity area having only the same theme, and an individual activity area unique to each user.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-188143 (Patent Document 4) discloses a collaborative editing management system that expands the functions of a contents management system serving as a base system to manage snapshots consistent through a plurality of pages and to manage comments separately for each version. This collaborative editing management system allows a document to be edited on a page-by-page basis, and manages the history of updates. The collaborative editing management system includes a means for receiving a request to generate a snapshot based on the indications of pages and a version, a means for generating a snapshot by putting together the pages of the specified version, a means for managing comments by associating these comments with the pages of the snapshot, and a means for displaying a page in response to a page display request.
The technology disclosed in Patent Document 1 is characterized by providing a Web-based interface and also characterized by the fact that the user-friendliness of schedule adjustment is improved in the management of various information items for communication such as announcements, schedules, bulletin boards, task management, address management, links, and booking management. This technology is not designed to manage activity contexts indicative of activity status in collaborative activity.
The technology disclosed in Patent Document 2 is characterized by improving the user-friendliness of notifying persons involved and viewing collaborative activity data in performing a collaborative activity while sharing the collaborative activity data. This technology is not designed to provide proper information depending on optimum activity contexts on a user-specific basis, and, thus, is not satisfactory in terms of user-friendliness.
The technology disclosed in Patent Document 3 is characterized by improving the user-friendliness of notifying persons involved in collaborative activity and presenting information on a user-role-specific basis. Since this technology is premised on the simultaneous work by persons involved, the users need to send notice explicitly. Further, this technology is not designed to present appropriate information depending on the activity contexts of users, and, thus, is not satisfactory from the viewpoint of user-friendliness.
The technology disclosed in Patent Document 4 serves to allow a document version to be managed. This technology, however, is not designed to present information regarding optimum activity contexts on a user-specific basis, and, thus, is not satisfactory from the viewpoint of user-friendliness. It is thus desirable to develop a technology that can provide high user-friendliness, and can assist a collaborative activity utilizing various types of shared information such as information about contents, projects, tasks, schedules, and communications.
Accordingly, there is a need for a collaborative activity assisting apparatus, a collaborative activity assisting system, a collaborative activity assisting method, and a recording medium having a collaborative activity assisting program embodied therein for performing integrated processing of the functions for assisting and managing a collaborative activity such as contents management, project management, workflow management, schedule management, and communication management. The collaborative activity assisting apparatus, the collaborative activity assisting system, the collaborative activity assisting method, and the recording medium having a collaborative activity assisting program embodied therein allow persons involved in collaborative activity to conveniently share information and activity contexts indicative of activity status of the collaborative activity. Further, the collaborative activity assisting apparatus, the collaborative activity assisting system, the collaborative activity assisting method, and the recording medium having a collaborative activity assisting program embodied therein allow each person to perform his/her activity by use of an appropriate function responsive to the activity status of his/her activity, thereby being able to assist the collaborative activity in a smooth, efficient, and user-friendly manner.